Sunday, November 11, 2012

Robert Reich on the New American Civil War

I know families in which close relatives are no longer speaking. A dating service says Democrats won’t even consider going out with Republicans, and vice-versa. My email and twitter feeds contain messages from strangers I wouldn’t share with my granddaughter.

What’s going on? Yes, we’re divided over issues like the size of government and whether women should have control over their bodies. But these aren’t exactly new debates. [. . .] And we’ve had bigger disagreements in the past – over the Vietnam War, civil rights, communist witch hunts – that didn’t rip us apart like this.

Part of the reason that there is a 'civil war' is because of people like Reich and their inability to fairly present the issues that divide us.

He mentions the abortion issue. It is not about whether women should have control over their bodies. Of course they should. It is about whether the fetus growing inside a woman is a part of her body in a sense of 'part' that would permit her to dispose of it the way she would dispose of unwanted fat through liposuction. Reich is not unintelligent: he is capable of understanding the issue. But he is intellectually dishonest: he does not present the issue objectively and fairly. He distorts it like the typical leftist ideologue he is. (See here for my refutation of the 'woman's body' argument.)

He does the very same thing with his talk of "communist witch hunts." That phrase implies that there was no communist infiltration of the U. S. government. But that was precisely the question. The phrase he employs is a question-begging epithet. Why? Well, there are no witches. So if you call something a witch hunt then you are implying that it is a hunt for something that doesn't exist. There is also the implication that the people conducting this search have some ulterior motive such as the desire to suppress all dissent.

The same goes for the phrase 'Red Scare' beloved of the Left. The phrase implies that there was no threat to our gvernment posed by communists. But again that was the very question, a question that is begged by the use of the phrase 'Red Scare.' As a matter of fact, it was not a mere scare, but a real threat. So 'Red Threat' is the proper phrase. After all, we now know that the Rosenbergs were Soviet spies and that Alger Hiss was a communist.

My point is that Reich is not intellectually honest. He understands the issues but he refuses to present them objectively and fairly. He is nothing but a leftist ideologue. And notice the tone of his piece. It begins with a gratuitous smear against Sarah Palin.

The piece ends with Reich's playing of the race card. So typical.

So while bemoaning the 'new American civil war,' he fuels it by his own contemptible behavior.